City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 Some complexities in English article use and acquisition Victoria Somogyi Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/286 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SOME COMPLEXITIES IN ENGLISH ARTICLE USE AND ACQUISITION by VICTORIA SOMOGYI A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York 2014 ©2014 VICTORIA SOMOGYI All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. Gita Martohardjono ________________________ ________________________________________________ Date Thesis Advisor Gita Martohardjono ________________________ ________________________________________________ Date Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract SOME COMPLEXITIES IN ENGLISH ARTICLE USE AND ACQUISITION by VICTORIA SOMOGYI Adviser: Gita Martohardjono Along with preposition use, native-like article use is one of the greatest difficulties for learners of English, particularly for those learners whose first languages do not have articles. And unlike many other areas involved in the mastery of the language, articles continue to present a challenge for advanced learners. A significant number of article usages are complex in that they are neither simple to explain (in that the does not encode definiteness or contextual uniqueness) nor strictly idiomatic. This paper a) provides an overview and critique of the scholarship on articles and their acquisition, b) takes a detailed look at several of the complex usages (noun phrases with genitive phrases, modified by the adjective “wrong,” or with a possible generic reading), and c) examines article acceptability judgments by English language learners with article-less L1s and by native speakers, both college students and adults. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . 1 Theories on the definite article. 3 Theories on article learning . 6 The study. 15 The results. 31 Conclusion . 39 References . 47 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Weak definites . 31 Table 2. Noun phrases with genitive phrases . 33 Table 3. Noun phrases with wrong . 34 Table 4. Noun phrases with people . 35 Table 5. Noun phrases with commercial institutions . 37 Table 6. Noun phrases with a normally uncountable noun . 38 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Google Books n-gram showing the occurrences of a wrong one and the wrong one over time. 35 vi LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A – Questionnaire . 42 Appendix B – Participants . 46 vii 1. Introduction Along with preposition use, native-like article use is one of the greatest difficulties for learners of English, particularly for those learners whose first languages do not have articles. And unlike many other areas involved in the mastery of the language, articles continue to present a challenge for advanced learners. In fact, these small determiners probably play a large role in advanced learners’ feeling that native-like English is an elusive goal. But articles are more than tiny words with the ability to mar the fluency of a conversation or text. They play a significant role in the communicative function of language. They can differentiate phonetically identical words: having an experience is very different from having experience; having a little money is much nicer than having little money. They can establish presuppositions: a study on eyewitness testimony and memory found that witnesses are far more likely to say that they remember something if the questioner’s the suggests its existence. Did you see the broken headlight? will receive more affirmative answers than Did you see a broken headlight? in both situations where the witnesses saw, in reality, such a headlight and ones in which they didn’t (Loftus, 1996). And, more subtly, they can convey assumptions, emphasis and the speaker’s conceptualization of a noun phrase. A number of factors affect English language learners’ ability to use articles in a native- like way. Studies have suggested many reasons for these problems: learners may make article errors due to misunderstanding the countability of the noun in the noun phrase, being unclear whether the encodes definiteness or specificity, viewing articles as adjectives and thus unnecessary if inessential to meaning. (White, 2009; Ionin, 2006; Yang & Ionin, 2009; Trenkic, 2008) Understandably, these studies have focused on article choices that are unambiguous for native speaker, and they have placed idioms into a separate category of article usage. 1 However, a significant number of article usages are neither simple to explain (in that the clearly encodes definiteness, or contextual uniqueness) nor strictly idiomatic. I wish to examine some of these uses, particularly of the definite article, the. Can these productive but complex uses be explained? Are native speakers uniform in their use of articles in these situations? Does explicit teaching play a significant role in learners’ acquisition of articles? And what other factors influence their acquisition? These questions are part of a larger question: why are articles so difficult, and can a native-like level of use be attained by non-native speakers? Many linguists and language theorists have discussed the meaning and function of articles in English. Although they have generated a variety of explanations about how articles function and about how native and other speakers learn the rules about article choice, none of the theories seems completely to account for the complex ways that articles are learned and used. This paper will summarize the main theories about the meaning of English articles, particularly the definite article, and will chart some of the limitations of each argument. After establishing the historical and current state of the field, I'll examine the most prominent scholarly work on the difficulties faced by both humans and computers as they move from article-less languages to English. Important to this overall discussion are the scholarly assessments of the complexities related to article usage. Many of these assessments attempt to answer some of the limitations of the most prominent general theories of usage, and in my review of the literature, I will concentrate on studies that examine several particular areas of complex, non-idiomatic uses of the: noun phrases including genitive phrases, noun phrases where both definite and null articles are grammatical, and noun phrases where the use of the definite article is connected to the meaning of the noun. 2 Yet even these studies do not fully explain many situations of article use in English and the ways in which native and non-native speakers interpret and select articles. To explore some of the remaining questions, I have designed a study that compares article judgments of learners and native speakers. The final section of the paper analyzes the results of the survey and offers some conclusions about the complexities of articles in English. 2. Theories on the definite article In “On Denoting,” Bertrand Russell claims that the indicates that the noun refers to a unique entity. Christopherson (1939) takes a similar view. More recently, the notion of uniqueness has been expanded to include familiarity, which in a sense is pragmatic or contextual uniqueness. (Birner and Ward, 2012). Ionin (2006) describes the as showing both a specific referent and (+SR) and hearer knowledge of that referent [+HK] and thus comes up with [+definite]. Although learners of English from article-less L1s don’t quickly attain this understanding, it is probable that if the rules were this simple, they would do so much faster. A significant number of noun phrases use articles in a way that is complex, and native speakers are not always unanimous about article choices. Thus, the input is problematic. We can, of course, see some of these uses as idioms, though these idioms may not be completely inexplicable—for example on the other hand and by hand. But there remain a number of situations in which article use is not fully explained by ideas of uniqueness (or familiarity.) Russell himself mentions a similar situation that does not fit his principle of uniqueness. "Now the, when it is strictly used, involves uniqueness; we do, it is true, speak of 'the son, of So-and-so' even when So-and-so has several sons, but it would be more correct to say 'a son of So-and-so'."(481) And Christopherson calls certain such uses “illogical.”(140) But it is not possible, from the standpoint of someone studying or aiding English language acquisition, to attempt to legislate or dismiss how native speakers use the definite article. 3 Attempts have been made to explain definite article use from a transformational/generative perspective, for example by claiming that the in a determiner phrase is indicative of a that clause at the deep structure level or that is anaphoric, referring back to a previous mention of the noun. Grannis (1972) finds these explanations inadequate to explain many uses of the. According to Birner and Ward (2012), neither unique identifiability nor familiarity are the only conditions for the use of the definite article. They use the term “lack of relevant differentiability” to explain usages such as open the window, take the elevator and go to the bank (when there are multiple windows, elevators and banks). Hawkins (1991) discusses pragmatics and Grice’s notions of conversational implicature in relation to the use of the indefinite rather than the definite article in sentences that introduce the existence of the noun. For example: England has a prime minister or There is a first time for everything.